U.N. to Seek Control of the Internet

U.N. to Seek Control of the Internet
Daniel Halper
November 26, 2012 2:48 PM

Next week the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union will meet in Dubai to figure out how to control the Internet. Representatives from 193 nations will attend the nearly two week long meeting, according to news reports.

"Next week the ITU holds a negotiating conference in Dubai, and past months have brought many leaks of proposals for a new treaty. U.S. congressional resolutions and much of the commentary, including in this column, have focused on proposals by authoritarian governments to censor the Internet. Just as objectionable are proposals that ignore how the Internet works, threatening its smooth and open operations," reports the Wall Street Journal.

"Having the Internet rewired by bureaucrats would be like handing a Stradivarius to a gorilla. The Internet is made up of 40,000 networks that interconnect among 425,000 global routes, cheaply and efficiently delivering messages and other digital content among more than two billion people around the world, with some 500,000 new users a day. ...

"Proposals for the new ITU treaty run to more than 200 pages. One idea is to apply the ITU's long-distance telephone rules to the Internet by creating a 'sender-party-pays' rule. International phone calls include a fee from the originating country to the local phone company at the receiving end. Under a sender-pays approach, U.S.-based websites would pay a local network for each visitor from overseas, effectively taxing firms such as Google and Facebook. The idea is technically impractical because unlike phone networks, the Internet doesn't recognize national borders. But authoritarians are pushing the tax, hoping their citizens will be cut off from U.S. websites that decide foreign visitors are too expensive to serve."

Arthur Herman explains "The UN's Internet Grab" here.

And even Google has already come out against the ITU.

"The ITU is the wrong place to make decisions about the future of the Internet," says Google. "Only governments have a voice at the ITU. This includes governments that do not support a free and open Internet. Engineers, companies, and people that build and use the web have no vote."

"The ITU is also secretive. The treaty conference and proposals are confidential," adds Google.

Wasn't the internet created by physicists during the Cold War as a weapon of war and then given to the general public for free?

15 years ago, it might have been possible for them to take control of the internet, but considering the impact it has on people's lives nowadays... yeah, good luck with that. You'd have an easier time taking control of our firearms.

Although personally, I think it would be quite exciting to see what would happen if they did happen to take control of it.

Hopefully, it will be stopped, and the possibility for them trying to do such a thing again would be stopped, perhaps due to public outrage.

The internet, should remain as it is now, in regards to how it is policed, or revenue is made.

Tin foil hat: Some countries want the censorship this could possibly bring.
Also, while they say it is for taxes, does anyone else note the fact that it would if passed, possibly make it prohibitively expensive for people in certain countries to get information from websites based in countries, say like the U.S. Effectively censoring certain websites from populations in certain countries.

it wont be long before someone or some cult decides to take full control or the net, its going to happen one day.
When you read about this kinda stuff happening you can just picture a bunch of fucking cocks sat in a room round a table trying to scheme all this shit up........These are the people that need to be destroyed and not allowed to walk the earth...unless there zombies!

Wasn't the internet created by physicists during the Cold War as a weapon of war and then given to the general public for free?

15 years ago, it might have been possible for them to take control of the internet, but considering the impact it has on people's lives nowadays... yeah, good luck with that. You'd have an easier time taking control of our firearms.

Although personally, I think it would be quite exciting to see what would happen if they did happen to take control of it.

The world would burn. Well, at least the ITU would. People who aren't internet savvy would get angry, and I could see it being something that might cause riots in countries that don't normally riot.

I think the only way for internet to be "free" is for people to network directly, without ISP in the middle. That also means you couldn't trust any website, because for example if you type in 'www.google.com', any pc could lie and say it's a google. You can build things to protect from this, but if you have a central node, than government will control it, whether you like it or not.

I think there's a lot of money in this, and the two 'internets' could co-exist. The current one for official things, like doing your banking, etc. The other one would be very hard to secure, but would work even if government unplugs the main nodes of "real" internet.